Saturday August 17, 2003Bertus Lüske, son of a butcher's assistant, started as a market vendor, gained experience on the market and in the hospitality industry and around 1980 focused exclusively on the real estate industry. No office blocks, like other local tycoons, but preferred "small things." It led almost immediately to violent clashes with the squatters' movement.

In 1981 Lüske bought for example squatters stronghold Lucky Luyk in the Jan Luykenstraat. With squatters, argued Lüske, you can do two things: either you can get them out by legal procedures, or you can physically kick them out. He preferred the latter: "For me it’s obvious: are you going to leave by yourselves, or should we give you a hand? So we cleaned it out.''

The affair surrounding the Lucky Luyk resulted in one of the largest squatters riots Amsterdam has ever known. A tram in the Van Baerlestraat went up in flames. Lüske eventually was forced to sell the squat again, in his own words, with a loss of six million guilders.

The question surfaced from time to time by the police and the judiciary on how Bertus Lüske came to earn all the tens of millions he had. Just with small-scale real estate transactions? In early 1996, according to the Van Traa commission, Lüske was one of the sixteen 'entrepreneurs' who pretty much controlled the Amsterdam Red Light District, and had "more or less serious criminal antecedents and / or obvious criminal connections."

Lüske was cryptically described in the report Van Traa, as “ local real estate dealer B.” In the newspaper he was referred to with his actual name Bertus Lüske. He was furious and supported by a legal advisor: he was-A. not a criminal.

-B. he absolutely didn’t know any criminals, only people who constantly got pestered by the police, and

-C. the government was trying to make him look bad.

Lüske still did not hesitate to get involved in obviously shady transactions, even recently, and even if it resulted in death threats, as was the case of the Bayside Beach Club in the Halvemaansteeg, near Rembrandt Square. The property has long been owned by the Kroonenberg group of the late 'Uncle Jaap' Kroonenberg. The Kroonenberg Group leased the property back to a major drug trafficker.

The drug trafficker tried - with palm trees, sand on the floor and plastic sharks - to create a thriving, imitation Caribbean establishment, but unfortunately, it didn’t work out. The drug trafficker then refused to pay rent to the Kroonenberg Group. Kroonenberg then hired a bailiff and thus a conflict was born. The Kroonenberg Group considered it wiser to get rid of the property two years ago, and sold it to Lüske. The conflict was not solved: now the drug trafficker demanded money from Lüske.

According to sources at the Amsterdam police, the conflict became so intense that both Lüske and his friend, companion and bodyguard, former boxer Rudy Koopmans, received death threats. Lüske however, didn’t want to back down in this conflict. Lüske’s biggest project ever was the purchase of the ADM site, but his revenue did not suffer from this small scale project: Quote valued his belongings the last time at a capacity of 36 million.

Steering his little empire from its imposing headquarters on the Weesperzijde-Ruyschstraat corner. Which he, like ordinary guys do, decorated from top to bottom with tiger skins, armory and other odds and ends. His motto: 'Never sell anything cheap. I am a simple man with no qualifications, but I won’t let let them eat my lunch'

Johannes Hubertus Lüske was born into a poor family with 9 children. His father was the son of a butcher. The young Bertus Lüske always had chores and jobs. At the age of 12 he became a market-trader and traveling sales-man. He started with fruit, which he sold from a rented "bakfiets". Lüske later in his life managed to get a license for street-trading.

Even before Lüske reached adulthood, he had several market stalls, and after a few years he took on a pub called The Old Lantern, which he gradually converted into a nightclub and after a while he bought the entire building. Next he bought himself a lampshade-store which was also converted into a pub, plus the seven surrounding buildings in order to prevent possible noise complaints. In those buildings he also established cafe's and restaurants. Eventually Lüske owned 15 small buildings on Amsterdam's Dapperplein and he was in the early 70s, thus gradually becoming a major player on the Amsterdam real estate market.

Problems with the squatters

In the autumn of 1982 Bertus Lüske made headlines on the front pages for the first time. He and some other muscled men evicted the notorious Lucky Luyk-squat in Amsterdam-South. It led to one of the biggest squatters' riots in the history of Amsterdam.

Lüske had purchased the building at a public auction and led personally the eviction done by a "knokploeg" of about 20 man. The furious Lüske was spotted throwing (metal) garbage containers around. A few days after that confrontation, the squatters were back again, angry and prepared for a new confrontation. The city then bought the Lucky Luyk from Lüske and had the Mobile Unit (ME) evict the building. This led to riots that lasted late into the night, a complete tram (line 10) was set on fire and destroyed. Mayor Wim Polak declared the state of emergency and more than 100 squatters were arrested. Video of eviction here

Lüske was in the 80s and 90s quietly expanding his Christmas tree of real estate companies. In Amsterdam, those companies owned many businesses and even entire streets, especially in the center of town and in the Watergraafsmeer.

Lüske also owned property in Zandvoort, including a hotel and the casino.

He himself lived for a long time in a villa in Huizen, later on in Naarden.

Lüske's villa in Naarden (last known asking price: 17 million euro)

Really big did Lüske hit success in the 90s; He bought entire blocks of property at the Rembrandtplein. In the spring of 1997 he sold "Amstelhoek" for more than 26 million guilders to housing association "Het Oosten" that bought more property which had fallen into the wrong hands, according to the Amsterdam municipality.

With the proceeds of that deal, Lüske bought in May 1997 (for the sum of 27 million guilders) the former ADM ship-building yard, leaving Amsterdam municipality behind, which had offered one million less.

The dispute about that yard between him and Amsterdam municipality turned into a legal marathon, in which the municipality and Lüske contested each other in the courtroom over zoning permission and contract chain terms. According to Lüske, town hall officials had deliberately sent squatters to his property. The mutual distrust was enormous. On April 25, 1998 Lüske tried to evict, surrounded by some 15 tough guys, the site of the former Amsterdam Dry Dock Company (ADM). The police eventually put an end to the battle between the squatters and the eviction team. (video of this eviction attempt here)

Top- or underworld?

Bertus Lüske was no real estate magnate who frequently pumped tens of millions in office blocks such as Willem Endstra had done. Lüske was more a building dealer - houses, blocks and even complete streets sometimes, and dealt also in hotels, restaurants and cafe's.

Around 1999 Lüske bought the building that houses the municipal public library, as part of the the ongoing battle over the ADM (more details here)

In 2001 "Bulldozer Bertus' bought the Bayside Beach Club from the estate of the deceased property broker Jaap Kroonenberg. Lüske wanted to convert this one into a luxury nightclub, like those in Miami Beach. But to the property clung a problem: a reluctant tenant, which was the big Amsterdam drug dealer Robbie "The Cigar" Arkenbout. There was thus a conflict between Arkenbout and Lüske. The Kroonenberg Groep finally bought the property back and behind the scenes Lüske negotiated a settlement with "the Cigar".

Amsterdam CSI got information in 2000 that Lüske was more often in contact with criminals. According to this information; Lüske, Jan Femer, Mink Kok, Sam Klepper and John Mieremet were involved with international XTC-trafficking. Lüske was the financier of the group, but this information does not lead to significant action against Lüske.

The end of the Bulldozer

The fact that Lüske was involved in serious crime became obvious in the summer of 2003. Lüske had just returned from a holiday in France. On the Saturday night of August 16th he had a BBQ dinner with his wife and daughter at the grand café / restaurant Frankendael (which he owned). On their way out two men approached the group and one of them emptied his automatic weapon into Lüske who was about to get into the waiting car. Lüske died on the spot.

Who is behind the liquidation, is as of yet unknown. When Lüske was liquidated, property dealer Endstra was interviewed by the Amsterdam CSI. Endstra said that almost all high-profile assassinations were conducted by the group of Willem Holleeder, but precisely this particular murder of Lüske wasn't. Lüske had been, told Endstra, according to Holleeder, so stupid as not to comply to a debt of 375,000 guilders. But to whom Lüske owed that money was not revealed by Endstra...

‘Brutal real-estate tycoon Lüske got killed’

Saturday night the controversial real estate broker Bertus Lüske (59) was brutally liquidated in front of a restaurant of his, Frankendael, at the Amsterdam’ Middenweg ....

By Marc van den EerenbeemtAugust 18, 2003, 02:23

Lüske died at the scene. His family members were not injured. The gunmen disappeared 'without a trace’, said a police spokesman. Their supposed getaway car was later found burnt-out in Amsterdam Southeast. That makes it plausible for the police that it is a settlement in the criminal circuit.

Lüske is one of the biggest real estate brokers in Amsterdam. In the Quote 500 (an annual list of the names of the richest people in the Netherlands), he is noted for a personal fortune of around forty million. Among his best known assets are the former ADM shipyard in Amsterdam and the central library on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

The Amsterdam’ squatters are having a party it seems, since the murder of Lüske. The response on squatters’ [web]site squat.net speak volumes about the reputation of the controversial Amsterdam dealer in real estate. “We’re flying the flag”, writes one of them. Another regrets not having been able to share in that "wonderful spectacle."

Lüske developed from a market vendor and catering boss to a tough real estate tycoon. For the squatting movement Lüske was a prime target, since he in 1981 bought the infamous squat Lucky Luyk. Around the property a real battle raged, among others, with Lüske and his comrades. He had to sell this in the end with a severe loss. A profit of tens of millions of euros he hoped to make with the ADM terrain; over forty hectares of private land in Amsterdam. However, the couldn’t get rid of the squatters, although he tried.

On a Saturday morning in 1998 the occupiers were rudely awakened when a heavy-duty shovel put its teeth in the facade. Lüske was standing outside with a bunch of broad shouldered men. After an initial sentence by the courts for four years for attempted murder, he was on appeal, last year, sentenced to one month suspended prison sentence and a 3500 euro fine.

’Bulldozer Bertus’ was also not a friend of the government. In old Amsterdam the municipality bought premises from him because there was an undesirable - i.e. criminal - owner. He got back at the same municipality by acquiring the [building of the] central library of the city: a status object on the Prinsengracht.

With the liquidation of Lüske the property sector in the capital is again been discredited. Last year kingpin John Mieremet accused in [newspaper] De Telegraaf, Lüske’s real estate colleague Willem Endstra, to act as ‘the bank of the maffia’. That same newspaper reported a half year ago about a conflict about buildings near the entertainment area Rembrandtplein. The police had been notified of impending violence between seller, buyer Lüske and a former tenant who, because of renovations still was owed several millions. Buyer Lüske didn’t want to pay that amount. Rumours that the same conflict has recently led the police to warn Lüske (again) for violence, the police doesn’t want to confirm.

A 'criminal real estate career’ has come to an end, squatters are writing on the internet. In an interview in 1998 in Quote, Lüske himself says: "No one has managed to destroy me. Not even the squatters." Saturday night things went differently.

‘Red roses and Sinatra at funeral Lüske’

The murdered real estate tycoon Lüske was hated by squatters and displaced tenants. The municipality of Amsterdam fended him whenever possible. Last Monday he was buried.

(From our reporter)Marc van den Eerenbeemt

‘Will the pain be less, if we know who the killer is? No”, says Lindy Lüske on Monday during the farewell ceremony in the Oude Kerk in Huizen. Ten days after the attack on her father, real estate tycoon Bertus Lüske, the question remains: ‘How could they do this to us?"

Lüske is on Monday commemorated by family, friends and acquaintances in a ceremony, that was under-pinned for the best part by music. Despite the church environment, religion has no place here. The consolation comes from the Dutch ‘Levenslied’ and the reminiscenses of life by Frank Sinatra. Singing from vinyl:

"That's life, that's what people sayYou're riding high in AprilShot down in May”

Sinatra sings furthermore about “Picking yourself up from the floor and winning again.”

Lüske came from afar, made it from a market vendor to real estate tycoon with a fortune of tens of millions.

In Huizen he lived in one of the largest, most beautiful villa of the village. Son Marcel claims to continue his life's work, “We never give up."Saturday night, a week ago, Lüske was shot dead in front of his car on the Amsterdam’ Middenweg.

The unknown perpetrators are fugitive. The investigations are, according to a police spokesman, "in full swing"The brutal attack smells like organized crime.But Lüske was not mafia, former business partners state. "More at the bottom of the upper world," said one of them.

Lüske was hated by squatters and displaced tenants. The municipality of Amsterdam banned him where possible, if necessary with retroactive effect. The city had to fumble deep into their pockets several times, to take on a number of premises of Lüske. His tough business attitude was also recalled yesterday. "Every guilder is one”, Lüske said sometimes.

'Bertus loved red roses" it read in the obituary. That message was picked up well. The funeral escorts needed two songs of Sinatra and one Girl from Ipanema to carry all the huge floral arrangements from the church. The family members filled two mourning carriages. Dozens of curious bystanders followed the loading of the flowers.

For 'Bulldozer Bertus' no shovel this time’, but a mourning carriage, guests said laughingly. They referred to the attempt of Lüske to rid a harbor terrain of his from squatters, using a shovel and a gang of muscle men.At the cemetery Nieuw-Valkeveen in Naarden, the last few meters of Lüske are over rose petals.

A page full of farewells for liquidated Lüske

Monday, says Wim Bohnen, friends of Bertus Luske already started calling. ,, Wim, how are we gonna do the farewell advertisments? " The night before the real estate entrepreneur Lüske was liquidated by his criminal enemies.

August 21, 2003

Wim Bohnen works at De Telegraaf - the ad department. He knew Bertus Lüske well ,, from the soccer world." They always sat in the same box at the Ajax matches. He has, he says, lost a good friend, “absolutely”. Wim Bohnen tells the funeral director, Rebel from Huizen "to coordinate it neatly." First the family, then the close friends, then the less good friends, then acquaintances and finally business associates.

So today in De Telegraaf an entire page is filled with obituaries for Lüske, the official farewell of the family on top: ,, ... my unique man, our great father and our best friend." And immediately below a poem by Lüske's wife, Janny: “ Why? Why? Why? What have you done wrong that this suffering is put upon us? "

In addition, a text Lüskes by son Marcel: ,, I had so much to discuss. But fortunately no conflicts to work out anymore." Daughter Lindy says she loves her father and will never forget him.

And after this the friends only sign their first name, former boxer and business partner Ruud Koopmans turn: ,,They killed our best mate. But justice will prevail.''

Further down the page there are ads of Theo Heuft, former owner of the luxurious Amsterdam sex club Yab-Yum (,, As a passionate and broad-shouldered man we’ll miss you a lot ''). Singer Dries Roelvink has an advert on the page too, with his wife (,, Never ever a duet again '').

The last advertisement on the page is by Dick Grijpink, the controversial director of taxi dispatcher TCA in Amsterdam (,, Unpolished, bold and striking. Amsterdam will miss you. '')

Funeral entrepreneur Rebel from Huizen is proud of the course of events. He 'does' Bertus Lüske, as it is known among his colleagues in jargon. ,,Everything was delivered in PDF format.'' He calls Wim Bohnen ‘Commissioner Bohnen'. Who, he says “directed him very well”.

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[english below]

The book "De oorlog in de Amsterdamse onderwereld", by Bart Middelburg & Paul Vugts, which was published in 2010, has a complete chapter about Bertus Lüske (chapter 8)

An excavator weighing more than 80 tons rolled, in the early Saturday morning of April 25, 1998 from a low-loader, in front of the squatted shipyard, formerly the Amsterdam Drydock Company (ADM), deep in the western port area of Amsterdam. In the office building before the huge warehouse, squatters were still sleeping; it was only six a.m. The excavator operator was not alone. Around his mighty shovel a group of broad-shouldered staff from demolition company De Steenkorrel was walking around, supplemented with some hired thugs, some of whom had acted as bouncers around the Rembrandt Square, the night before. The group was led by the owner who came to recapture his terrain on the squatters, real estate millionaire Bertus Lüske.

He had, he would explain later, "taken the largest excavator he could find”, after two foiled evacuation efforts, by the squatters and police, to start finally the demolition of the office building, that the by him so hated squatters had made their “breeding nest”. It had to happen now once and for all, before the occupants of his property could continue their plans for a party at which they would ask fifteen guilders entrance fee and at which they ‘would sell pills’. The brutality!

Lüske didn’t want to wait for permission of the town hall anymore. So he decided to demolish the buildings without permission and without an investigation that the buildings were empty and therefore ready for demolition. 'Bulldozer Bertus', as his nickname had been since decades, led the excavator from the entrance gate of the ADM to the office building. Before the first squatters who were awakened by the noise could warn their friends, the machine took bites out of the façade. The former porter's lodge and the above floors went out and immediately afterwards the corner of the building, where on the third floor were still a few squatters sleeping. The just awakened squatter Milou could just pull her boyfriend Joachim out of the bed, seconds before it was destroyed by the gripper, and ended up down in the rubble. Around the corner, on the long side of the office building, the drum kit of squatter Guido just flew past by him, squatter Bernd was looking the imperturbable excavator operator in the eye, standing next to his sleeping place. He was able to jump away just in time.

Downstairs a squatter tried to stop the demolition by parking his truck between the excavator and the façade, but that ended up in a brawl with Lüske’s men. The thugs hard-handed kept the protesting squatters at a distance, Lüske also interfered with the riots. He would state later that he ‘might have worked a bit with my body’, because he was simply 'a bit energetic’. He denied the allegations of hitting, head-butting and even lifting a squatter by the neck, as the squatters claimed. That would be unwise, seen from a business point of view. ‘I don't hit. How could I hit people when I have to deal with banks?’ His own lawyer later came with a slightly modified statement in which he stated that Lüske started 'panicking and therefore was hitting all around him’, which the lawyer stated was ‘a bit silly’, but not very condemnable.

With a bit of effort the police was able to stop the illegal demolition and the conflicts, but it wasn’t over yet for Lüske. He ended up in jail for more than a month, for among others: attempted homicide, threats, assault and destruction, or ordering to do so. Justice demanded four years in prison, but Lüske got away in 2002, with a fine of 3,500 euro’s and one month suspended jail sentence. The punishment was so minimal because it had taken four years before the case was brought to court, which the Amsterdam Court found unreasonably long.

The conflict on the ADM shipyard was the last one in a long series of clashes of Bulldozer Bertus with squatters, and with local governance. Clashes, literally, often with Lüske sending thugs into his squatted premises.

Hubertus Johannes (Bertus) Lüske (1944) was a son of a poor family with nine children. his father was a butcher's assistant. At home, on an upper floor in the Amsterdam neighbourhood the Dapperbuurt, he would also sometimes clandestine, slaughter cows and pigs, as Lüske junior loved to tell later. Lüske senior was a gifted boxer. The war had prevented that he entered the world top of boxing.

Young Bertus Lüske always had chores and jobs. As a child of nine, he worked during and after plenty of truancy, at the vegetable peels collector, the metal collector and with the market traders of the Dapper market. As a twelve year old he became a product promoter and a market vendor. He started to sell rotting, sour cherries, which he sold from a rented ‘bakfiets’. Later he also would sell other fruit. He learned the most important lesson of his life, which he would make his motto: ‘Never sell anything too cheap’. When things are cheap, people will think of it as being bad, people won’t buy that. Eventually Lüske graduated in street trading, and he was not ashamed for it being ‘the only piece of paper’ that he possessed. ‘I do not even have a swimming certificate’.

Even before Lüske was an adult, he had several market stalls, and after a few years he decided to add a pub: De Oude Lantaarn (The Old Lantern), for which he got a loan in person by Alfred Heineken. He gradually converted The Old Lantern into a nightclub and he bought the entire property. His later soulmate and top-boxer Rudi Koopmans was a bouncer, DJ Rob Out was spinning records and the later musical star Ben Cramer came to sing.

At the Dapperplein Lüske successively bought a lampshade-shop to convert it into a bar, plus seven buildings around it to prevent complaints about inconvenience. Even in those buildings he established horeca industry. Eventually Lüske owned fifteen small buildings on the square, he thus, in the early seventies, gradually became a real-estate guy. He continued to be one, with success.

Bertus Lüske didn’t have a sophisticated appearance. He was not tall, but quite robust and had an impressive head. In style with an equally impressive scar under his crooked mouth, from jaw surgery. He loved boxing, although he never boxed matches, like his father. Lüske junior stuck to coaching, and street fighting, if he had to. A real estate agent of the type ‘stone- seller’, in short. 'Bulldozer Bertus' was a nickname which he wasn’t ashamed of, and if its appearance was seen as ‘a modest appearance’, then that was fine.

His brothers were also active in the Dapperbuurt. Marcel and Charles Lüske started an illegal gambling house. They had a problem in the early eighties with a Greek customer called Santos, who busted the bank that evening. He was cheating in a ingenious way, it turned out. The Greek marked the cards with a chemical liquid, which he only could see with special contact lenses. When the brothers Lüske had discovered the cheating, they put a gun to the head of the Greek and took all his money. They drove him to the Sonesta Hotel in the city where he lived, to also empty the safe there. The Greek, however, began to scream for help.

Charles shot, as punishment for the fraud, two bullets through ‘his device’, as a police detective at the time put it. Charles Lüske got nine months in prison for attempted homicide, the Greeks remained disabled. Marcel Lüske moreover subsequently began an impressive poker career, flew all over the world and became world famous in the pokercircuit. Bertus' youngest brothers nickname is now ‘The Flying Dutchman’ and he got famous with a curious trademark; he wears his expensive sunglasses upside down.

In the fall of 1982 Bertus Lüske made it to all the front pages. He evicted the Lucky Luyk, on the corner of the Jan Luijkenstraat and the Van Baerlestraat in Amsterdam Zuid, with a gang of hired thugs. It led to one of the biggest squatter riots in the history of Amsterdam.

Lüske had bought the building at a public auction, annoyed about the brutality of some forty squatters in the hall, who had taken away the hammer of the auctioneer and had knocked over a glass of water from the lectern with it. Lüske bought the squat, paid cash and evicted it by a gang consisting of about twenty men, according to the squatters armed with crowbars and baseball bats with nails in it. The furious Lüske was there himself to throw garbage cans. ‘They should keep their hands off your stuff’, he later explained. ‘I see it quite simple, you can either go by yourself or we can lend you a hand, let me state it this way, they didn’t leave by themselves, so we decided to clear it out.’

A few days after that confrontation, the squatters were already back, angry and prepared for a new riot. The municipality bought then the Lucky Luyk from Lüske, who lost in his own words, six million on the deal. The riot police evicted the building again. which led to riots that lasted late into the night, at which tram 10 went up in flames, the state of emergency was declared by mayor Wim Polak and more than a hundred squatters were arrested.

His battles with the squatters were for Lüske a logical consequence of the way he thought of justice. He had tried to explain to American business associates how you were supposed to watch and stand by how other people could squat your real-estate. They had frowned upon him. ‘In America they would have shot the squatters off the land. That’s the way they do it there’, he once said, in the corridors of the court house. In one of the few interviews he gave, with editor Jort Kelder of business magazine Quote, Lüske said that for him ‘boy of the street’ it was incomprehensible that others could steal premises with immunity that he had bought with ‘expensively loaned money’. ‘When I buy something, I'm the owner. All over the world it is that way, except in the Netherlands.’

It was very convenient that Lüske still had a lot more guys from the street in his entourage, and especially a lot of tough guys from the gym and boxing ring, which wanted to help him for a small fee, to get back his belongings. The leader of the gang which cleared for Lüske the Lucky Luyk, was Jan Plas, also known by the police and judiciary. Plas introduced, after his kickboxing career, as the owner of the most notorious gym in the scene, Mejiro Gym in the Jordaan, in the seventies, Muay Thai kickboxing to the Netherlands. He did this with a leading detective: Inspector Jan van Looijen, deputy head of the Amsterdam Criminal Investigation Unit.

Plas was trainer of kickboxing world champion Andre Brilleman, bodyguard in the mafia organization of Klaas Bruinsma (and in 1985 almost certainly violently liquidated, commissioned by Bruinsma, after he had scammed the 'Reverend'). Plas was, according to the Justice department, also involved in the kidnapping of Gijs van Dam junior in 1986, the son of hashish dealer Gijs van Dam senior. Later, in the nineties, Plas was towards the end known as the accomplice of hashish dealer Johan 'the Hakkelaar' Verhoek. Plas had in his capacity of 'treasurer' of Verhoek, collected millions of dollars worth of hashish in Canada and stored this in an apartment in Montreal. He actually crossed over and became the ‘crown witness’ of the Justice department in the criminal case against Verhoek and was given a small sentence of 240 hours of community service. That Plas had led Lüske’s thugs at the Lucky Luyk 'to start a gym’, was the official version.

During that turbulent period Bertus Lüske opened on the Rembrandt Square, on the corner of the Amstelstraat with the Paardenstraat, a new entertainment club. He was already exploiting ‘the biggest browning center of Europe’, tanning center Safe Sun in that property. Downstairs he opened nightclub Super Star. Initially it wasn’t very successful, so Lüske decided to drastically change the policy in 1984. Friend Ben Cramer was going to host talent shows every Sunday night, there were fashion shows and theater performances. But there was more, as Lüske said to Amsterdam free newspaper Echo at the time. ‘As icing on the cake, every Friday superstars will perform’. Danny Christian, the Star Sisters, Vanessa, Dolly Dots, Anita Meijer and Lee Towers. (...) "The place should be full, even if it empties my wallet”, tanning boss Lüske decided. The famous nightclub 'with the allure of Las Vegas’, which Lüske envisioned, the Super Star never became. It was a fiasco.

In the eighties and nineties, Lüske calmly continued to expand his vast collection of real- estate companies, with as headquarters a stately baroque decorated building on the corner of the Weesperzijde and Ruyschstraat, on the Amsterdam’ river the Amstel. Under the ‘mother companies’ Administratiekantoor Hubertus Johannes Lüske and the Stichting Administratiekantoor Jannie Bos (named after Lüskes second wife) hung numerous companies and holdings like H&R Holding, Chidda Vastgoed, Lubo Vastgoed (a contraction of Lüske and Bos), Biblio Monumenten, Samura München, Hotel Participatie Weesperzijde and numerous other companies. In Amsterdam the companies owned many buildings and streets, especially in the center and in the neighbourhood Watergraafsmeer. In Zandvoort, Lüske owned among others, a hotel at the casino. He himself lived for a long time in a villa at the Oud Bussumerweg in Huizen, later he would live a bit further in het Gooi, in Naarden. When the editors of business magazine Quote would call in the run-up to the annual ranking of the 500 richest Dutch, Lüske usually replied that they had to rank him at ́about 100 million guilders ́. No one exactly knew how much he owned.

Lüske went for the big shots in the nineties. He bought buy whole blocks of properties at the Rembrandt Square - between the Amstel, the Amstelstraat and Wagenstraat - including a whole bunch of properties of diamonds company Stoeltie. In the spring of 1997, he sold this ‘Amstel corner’ for more than 26 million guilders to housing corporation Het Oosten, which often bought property which, according to the municipality, had fallen in the hands of wrong people. With the proceeds from the deal, he bought the largest object that he would ever own in Amsterdam: he hijacked for 27 million guilders in May 1997 the ADM shipyard off the municipality, which offered a million guilders less. The yard was huge: forty three hectares. Lüske didn’t need a mortgage.

The dispute that evolved about the wharf with the municipality, turned into a legal marathon, with the municipality and Lüske in the courtroom, fighting each other with contested zoning and perpetual clauses. Where he had hoped to sell the shipyard years later ‘for 87 million’, he ended up, in his own words, with 25,000 guilders interest loss per week. According to Lüske, officials of his opponent alderman Duco Stadig, at the time PVDA councilor for Construction, Housing and Environment Planning, had sent the squatters to his property (‘There is still something beautiful empty ...'). Mutual distrust was enormous. Lüske on his turn decided to purchase the building in which the main branch of the public library resided, on the Prinsengracht. In that way the municipality was, as a tenant dependent on him, which gave a lot of turmoil at the town hall.

Investigators of the parliamentary committee of inquiry, led by PVDA-MP Maarten van Traa, put 'local real estate broker B.’ in 1996 on their list of shady entrepreneurs who pretty much ran the area in and around the Red Light District and who ‘had more or less a serious criminal record and / or obvious criminal connections’. For that reason the municipality tried to avoid Lüske whenever possible.

In 1999, town hall won a battle in the little trench warfare. Lüske wanted to buy the prestigious building on the Prins Hendrikkade, where just recently the institute Oibibio of feel-good guru Ronald Jan Heijn had gone bankrupt. The building would initially be auctioned publicly, but after the city council was tipped off that Lüske was preying on it, the public housing corporation Het Oosten was helped to buy the property. The auction was therefore called off. Lüske, who already had sorted the financing in order to buy the property, was furious. ‘I'm a simple guy with success. They won’t let me have it’, Lüske later complained to Quote. ‘The municipality bothers me and the squatters try to make a martyr of me. There's so much nonsense about me in the papers.’

That interview in the business magazine included a picture where the real estate dealer posed with a wide grin in the living room of the Gooi’ villa he shared with his wife and the two youngest of his five children, since 1998. Lüske acquired the cottage, in woody Valkeveen, in Naarden, from the widow Jaffa Pierson. Next to him was living Herman Heinsbroek, who was for a short while LPF (former right wing party red.) minister, and his neighbour was another LPF leader, Ferry Hoogendijk.

Lüske’s entrance was flanked by sculpted dog heads, of his favourite dog breed, of course: the boxer. The picture showed at Lüske’s feet on the parquet, a tiger skin, with the head still attached. Here was, in checkered suit, with sharp crease, a street boy who had made it.

With his appearance he seamlessly fit in the martial arts world, where he was fond of. In the seventies and eighties he visited matches of his best friend Rudi Koopmans, already on the edge of the boxing ring. He was already closely involved in major matches, such as the world title in 1980 in America. In 1975 Lüske and Koopman had attended in New York the famous battle between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.

Lüske had a lot of friends in the boxing world. In the Netherlands he himself turned into a well-known figure in the martial arts circuit. As a sponsor, he visited the big boxing gala’s with his best friend Koopmans at the table in the VIP box. Upon the departure of wrestler and free fighter Chis Dolman, who stopped in February1995 in Amsterdam Sporthallen Zuid, after thirty-five years with his active martial arts career, sponsor Lüske handed him one of the prizes, as did his friend Theo Heuft, then owner of luxury brothel Yab Yum, and president 'Big Willem' van Boxtel of the Amsterdam’ Hells Angels.

A few years later Bertus Lüske, together with to two other well-known persons from the Amsterdam real estate world, were the main sponsors of a grand sports gala fighting in the Rotterdam sporting palace Ahoy. His fellow financiers were Jan Dirk Paalberg and David Beesemer. And according to a press release, where the organizers talked about ’the netto highest doted fighting sports gala ever organized in our country’. Especially the first, the wealthy real estate agent and resident of the manor Ridderhofstad Bolenstein on the Vecht, seemed an odd man out. Paarlberg tried in those years, as the well-groomed friend of VVD minister and later European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, really hard to get into higher class circles. The 'Simply the Best-fighting gala in Ahoy’ was another Umfeld, with fighters who had made a name in kickboxing, K1 popular in Japan and free fighting. Much later Paalberg would emerge in an entourage which fitted better with such fight’ gala’s: the circles around Amsterdam's top criminal Willem Holleeder. Holleeder was, to complete the circle, again an acquaintance of Lüske. They surely weren’t friends.

Bertus Lüske was not a real estate magnate who invested with great regularity tens of millions in office blocks, like his idol ‘Uncle' Jaap 'Kroonenberg had done, or Willem Endstra. Lüske was more of a pawnbroker - in houses, blocks and ‘streets' sometimes, and catering businesses. Very big projects just gets you a lot of headaches, thought Lüske. Still, he was looking right for the headache dossiers in the smaller projects. He fought literally and figuratively (in long ongoing court-cases) with squatters and tenants, moved slums and infected premises that nobody wanted and tried to sell it with profit all in his own way and solved the problems the hard way.

From The Kroonenberg Group, the legacy of Jaap Kroonenberg, he bought the property Bayside Beach club in 2001 in the Halvemaansteeg behind the Rembrandt Square - inclusive problems. That property should have been a copy of the successful Rotterdam Baja Beach Club, which in its turn was a copy of the hot nightclubs in Miami Beach. With attempts at a tropical feel, palm trees next to the dance floor, scantily clad waitresses, beach sand on the floor and a plastic shark on the ceiling. The tenant behind the scenes was a major drug dealer in Amsterdam who was named in the circuit the 'Cigar', or the 'Bingo King. Who did not pay his rent. Lüske bought the whole plot for a price far below the liquidation value, but with the stipulation that he would solve the problems encountered. After much ado, the bailiff cleared out the building. The 'Cigar' was furious. Instead of paying, he himself claimed a hefty 'compensation' for his defunct 'investment' in the property. When Lüske didn’t give in, the Criminal Intelligence Unit (CIE) began to warn him that the mafia was preparing an attack on his life, and an attempt on the life of Lüske’s best friend, business partner and bodyguard Rudi Koopmans. The 'Cigar' continued to bombard the Kronenberg Group. The Kronenberg Group chose for the easy way out, bought the business back of Lüske and made an agreement behind the scenes with the ‘Cigar'.

Lüske’s trips to the fighting sports gala’s, which seem to attract shady people, strengthened his criminal image. But yeah, argued Lüske, why couldn’t he be there, whilst the free fight matches were being led by referee Jan van Looijen, the detective of the CIE (Criminal Intelligence Unit) in Amsterdam? Lüske was in those gala’s exactly in the position he actually spent his whole life in, on the edge of the upper- and underworld.

At the Amsterdam detective unit in 2000, information came in that he sometimes crossed that line. According to that information, which at the time was then processed in a confidential organogram, Lüske was with Jan Femer, Mink Kok, Sam Klepper and Johnny Mierenet in an international ecstasy trafficking scheme. The group, in which Lüske would have the role of ‘financier’, traded with a group of Englishmen in pills. The British would have payed twenty five million pounds for a shipment of ecstasy to Kok, Femer, Klepper and Mierenet, who in their turn would exchanged the money for fake pounds, and gave those to 'financier' Lüske. Based on that theory, the police detectives connected Bertus Lüske after the liquidation of Femer and Klepper, to the murders.

Lüske was in the scene also associated with the Yugoslav leader Jotsa Jicic and his accomplice Zoran Vrhovac, liquidated in November 2000, in Japanese restaurant Kobe on the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. According to an informant of the CIE, Lüske had 'ordered' Jocic to murder Femer and Klepper, according to another he had ‘collaborated’ with the liquidations of the Yugoslavs. The rumours were never confirmed, the organogram has not led to significant action against Lüske.

That Lüske, in any way, had got into serious crime, became obvious in the summer of 2005, just in the time that he devised plans for a grand farewell and retirement, Lüske had just returned from a trip to Las Vegas with his brother Marcel, to see the poker pro there at work, after which he had enjoyed a little holiday in France. He was in a good mood. On the Saturday night of 16 to August 17, he left with his wife and daughter grand café and restaurant Frankendael on the Middenweg in Amsterdam Watergraafsmeer.

They had barbecued in the restaurant, which since October 2002 was owned by Lüske’s son Marcel. Two men approached them, and one of them fired an automatic weapon at Lüske until there were no